Crime Syndicate 0.1.2.3 - Black Market Update Experimental

Hi all!

I'd like to thank everyone for playing and reaching 598 total downloads, It means a lot!

We're back with a free major update that adds an item based system with the ability to purchase Weapons, Armour and Vehicles and equip them for your Character. 

This is an experimental release, thank you for being patient, though a lot more is expected to come in the upcoming weeks and months and within the future.

As it stands, we have a few concepts such as Properties Management and the Jobs Menu which are not at all connected. In this update we hope to change that with the new additions of this update.

v0.1.2.3 - Crime Syndicate - Black Market Update Experimental

Game Engine

• The game has been updated to use GameMaker: Studio version 1.4.9999

Background Play

The game now runs in the background for both the HTML5 Version and the Downloadable Release. You can let the game run in the background for the downloadable release by Alt Tabbing.

Dev Note: I'll continue to test this with other platforms for compatibility.

Shop and Inventory System

• 13 New Melee Weapons to be bought from Shop.
• 52 New Materials have been added, can be viewed from inventory.

Agency System

You can now run your own black market agency, off the books of course. The agency acts as a central hub that allows the player to purchase and craft items that are stored here. 'Items' are split into 6 categories; Weapons, Armour, Vehicles, Materials, Blueprints and Elementary.

A new type of currency coined Clan Parts; (CP) is used to craft certain Items including Elementary Items, but Items such as Weapons can also scrap back into currency, so its worthwhile to hold onto. You can also earn CP by sending Agents on Trips. More on that, below.

The Agency starts at Level 0, send Agents on Trips to increase this level and unlock new transportation slots.

Trips Menu

You can send Agents on Trips in order to get different types of Items (excluding Elementary Items), your agents will retrieve items from different locations which will then be automatically transferred to the Agents Hub, once the timer has reached 0.

Note: Keep an eye on your storage! This is shown within the Shop.

Agency Employees

These are the Agents you send on Trips, you need enough Agents to get better loot and shorten the time it takes for them to come back. Agents are shown as silhouettes, click them to purchase them, then click again to equip/unequip. They are shown in Bronze, Silver and Gold Tiers, with each rank being better than their counterparts.

Manager Menu

You can access ongoing Trips here and start new ones provided that they have finished.

Jobs System Changes - (Drop Magazines 1 to 100)

All Jobs now have a 10% chance to drop three randomly generated Items (Materials and Blueprints), in addition, 5% chance to drop a (Weapons, Armour, Vehicles) and a 2.5% chance to drop Magazines. Magazines are numbered between 1 to 100 These are not stacked percentage wise.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the phone text was not aligned vertically using: draw_set_valign(fa_top)
• Fixed several other undocumented bugs and issues.
  

Other Additions/Changes

• Added the Blackmarket Hub to the phone.
• Added 9 Cities to the Trips Menu.
• Added game resolution and window resolution can be viewed via options menu.
• Added phone quick access icon, can be moved using mouse right click.
• Added maximum storage cap of 2,147,483,646/2,147,483,646, for all Items.
• Changed phone refresh interval rate from 0.1 seconds to 1.0 seconds.
• Changed some phone notifications and added several new ones.
• Changed the Real Estate icon on phone.
• Improved phone texture to reduce artifacts.
• Improved the options menu so that clickable buttons look more prominent.
• Improved quit function code cleanup. There is now a prompt before you quit.
• Improved code refactoring and texture management to reduce file size.

Conclusion

Though there is still a lot of work to be done, the next few updates will be bug fixes, QoL additions, code refactoring and removing technical debt; to be done to ensure the game runs optimally on your desktops. There will be more updates coming to the existing systems such as the Hitmen Jobs and Properties Management.

Updates will start coming out with several weekly iterative releases. Once that is done, I'll be continuing work on my other two big projects, before developing another major update for the game. So there might be a small gap in between the last patch and the large update.

All the content has been added to the HTML5 Version.

Bug Tracker (Trello)

But rest assured, there are still several concepts I'd like to implement as well as the end-game content. Most of these have already been designed concept-wise, but will just need implementation. I can't wait to share more in-depth details about these future updates! Check out the roadmap on the main page for more information.

Please remember to leave comments/feedback and suggestions, as time goes on, I become blind to my own games. I will listen to your feedback!

Thanks for your patience and thanks for playing our vision, stay safe.

-TeamCS1